There was nearly a 10% increase in new jobless filings across America in the weekly report.
New jobless claims in Florida posted a notable drop for the week ending Feb. 28.
The U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) posted the latest unemployment filings and it was a decent week for the Sunshine State. There were 4,845 initial claims made in the most recent report. That’s a decline of 763 filings that were made in the week ending Feb. 21 at 5,608.
While Florida’s number of new jobless claims went down, that cut against the national weekly trend. There was a significant increase in those filings among the latest figures.
A total of 213,090 initial claims were made across the U.S. in the DOL report. That’s a jump of 9.7% or 18,820 new filings in the weekly figures. That’s right about where DOL economists had projected. Those analysts had predicted there would be 18,938 new filings for the period.
The annual national comparison produced a drop in the figure. There were 226,019 new filings across the country for the same comparable week a year ago.
The most recent monthly unemployment figure for Florida came in at 4.3% in December. That’s just below the national figure which was 4.4% in February.
FloridaCommerce reported that Florida figure was an increase of a 0.1 percentage point from November’s figure. There were 486,000 jobless Floridians out of a labor force of 11,225,000 in December.
Breaking it down further, there were 10.04 million nonagriculutural jobs in December. That’s a gain of some 40,000 jobs in the year-over-year comparison. That’s an increase of about 0.4 percentage points. But it was a drop of about 4,200 jobs compared to November or a drop of 0.1 percentage points.